by Dave Barry
The History Of Art
The first art was created by primitive people, who made pots and plates with primitive decorations. They didn’t realize this was art. They thought it was just pots and plates. Their problem was that seconds after they made a pot or plate, an archaeologist would race up and snatch it and put it in a museum. The primitive people tried all kinds of schemes to protect their pots and plates, including burying them, but the archaeologists would just dig them up. Finally, with nothing to cook in or eat from, the primitive people starved to death and became extinct.
The next big trend in art was painting, which was invented because wealthy people needed something to put on their walls. One famous painter, Michelangelo (first name, Buford), even painted on the ceiling. This was before the discovery of acoustical tiles. In those days, everybody painted the same subject, which was Mother and Child. That was a really popular item. Occasionally, an artist would try something different, such as Mother and Trowel, or Mother and Labrador Retriever, but they never sold.
After the Mother and Child Phase came the Enormous Naked Women Eating Fruit Phase, which was followed by the Just Plain Fruit with No Women of Any Kind Phase and the Famous Kings and Dukes Wearing Silly Outfits Phase. All of these phases were part of the Sharp and Clear School of painting, which means that even though the subjects were boring, they were at least recognizable. The Sharp and Clear School ended with Vincent Van Gogh, who invented the Fuzzy but Still Recognizable School and cut off his ear. This led to the No Longer Recognizable at All School, and finally the Sharp and Clear Again but Mostly Just Rectangles School, which is the school that is popular today, except at shopping malls.
How To Appreciate Art
The number one rule of art appreciation is that you never ever bring up the issue of whether or not a particular piece of art is attractive. Let’s say you’re looking at a painting of two large green rectangles. If you say something like, “Those two large green rectangles are very attractive,” people will realize immediately that you do not appreciate art. What you want to say is: “Using the tension created by the contrast in line, shape and tone, offset by the almost deliberately simplistic linearity of hue, the artist subtly, yet inevitably, leads the viewer to a greater awareness of the need for more controls over the acquisition and use of our nation’s mineral resources, particularly zinc.” This particular sentence will work on almost any brand of art except enormous naked women, who obviously have nothing to do with zinc.
Music To Get Rich By
Basically, there are two kinds of music: “Classical” music, which is the kind written by dead German guys and played by People wearing tuxedos. “Regular” music, which can be written by anybody and played by anybody and gets on the radio a lot.
If you want to make large sums of money, you should get into regular music. These days classical music is popular with only about three hundred people, the same ones who contribute voluntarily to public television. Classical music tends to go on for days, which is why it is played by “orchestras,” or groups of four hundred fifty to five hundred people whose parents made them practice classical music when all the other kids were out learning how to french-kiss. Orchestra people divide up the labor: one group will play a batch of music or “movement,” then everybody sits back and reads magazines from little magazine stands while the “conductor” consults his notes and decides which musicians will play next. Sometimes the conductor singles out a musician who has been chewing gum or fooling around and forces him or her to play all alone while the other musicians snicker. If you ever have to be in an orchestra, you should try to sit in back, near the guy who plays the triangle. You’ll hardly ever get called on.
Music scholars divide orchestra instruments into five families:
Instruments You Blow into and Eventually Have to Get the Spit out of (tubas, whistles, cormorants, tribunes).
Instruments You Hit (drums, triangles, rhomboids, homophones).
Instruments That Are Easily Concealed (piccolos).
Furniture (pianos).
Instruments That Could Turn out to Be Worth a Million Skillion Dollars (violins). The really valuable violins are the ones made by Antonio Stradivarius, which are prized because they were made with exquisite care and craftsmanship and each one contains just over seventeen ounces of pure heroin in a secret compartment which you open by pressing with your chin.
Classical music gradually lost popularity because it is too complicated: you need twenty-five or thirty skilled musicians just to hum it properly. So people began to develop regular music. The most profitable kind of regular music is rock ‘n’ roll. Rock ‘n’ roll comes from the blues, a kind of music developed by American slaves. It is called the “blues” because it is very sad. Evidently the slaves found slavery depressing. Blues lyrics generally go like this:
My woman she done left me
My children left me too
My mule done kicked my kidneys
And my income tax is due
For a long time, blues music was popular only with black people, who were then known as “Negroes.” Black blues musicians played in lowdown bars for very little money. Then, in the early 1950s, young white people got interested in the blues. They developed a modified version called “rock ‘n’ roll,” which became enormously popular and turned many of them into millionaires. They routinely paid homage to the black blues musicians who paved the way for them, who made it all possible, and who continued to play in lowdown bars for very little money.
The principal difference between rock ‘n’ roll and classical music is that your average piece of classical music has about a dozen melodies and no words, whereas your average rock ‘n’ roll song has one melody (sometimes less) and about a dozen words. When rock ‘n’ roll composers are in a hurry to finish songs so they can get to important luncheon dates, they sometimes make up some of the words. Take, for example, the words to the 1960s hit rock ‘n’ roll song “Sittin’ in La La”:
Sittin’ in la la waitin’for my ya ya
Uh huh, uh huh
Sittin’ in la la waitin’for my ya ya
Uh huh, uh huh
Probably the composer planned to go back and put in real words for “la la” and “ya ya,” but before he could get around to it somebody released the song and it sold several million records. Another example is “Land of a Thousand Dances,” whose composer evidently got called away to an urgent appointment after he had written only two words:
I said aa na aa aa aa Na aa na na na na aa na na na Na na na na
The other kinds of regular music you can make money from are country music, which is popular with people who like songs about drunken infidelity but requires singers with funny clothes and Southern accents; big-band music, which is popular with people who like big bands but requires big bands; and easy-listening music, which is popular in elevators and supermarkets but can be sung only by groups of heavily sedated suburbanites. You should steer clear of jazz, opera, folk, marching-band and bagpipe music: the market for these is minuscule. You will never see hordes of fans clamoring for the autograph of a bagpiper.
How To Read Music
Anyone can read music. It’s simply a matter of memorizing the various notes and musical signs. The major notes are:
dum da de tra tra-la
The major musical signs are:
start of song
halfway through song
clap hands two-thirds of way through song
end of song
Prurient Interest Rate
I am opposed to pornography. First, let me make it clear that I believe if God wanted people to be seen naked, He would not have made so many of them unattractive. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to write about pornography, because it is directly related to the increase in drug abuse, unemployment, international terrorism, all-polyester clothing, and, above all, violence. This was a far less violent country in the days when pornography was illegal, unless you count the Civil War. Pornography is like tooth decay,
eating slowly away at the molars of our morals, and if it is not stopped we will wind up as a toothless nation, gumming at the raw meat of international competition while the drool of decadence dribbles down our collective chin and messes up the clean tablecloth of our children’s futures. The dictionary tells us that the word “pornography” comes from the words “Porno,” meaning “publications,” and “graphy,” meaning “that adolescent males gather around in junior high school halls and snicker at.” The problem is that this simple definition is inadequate for the legal authorities, who need something less comprehensible. So for the past twenty years or so, the legal authorities have spent enormous amounts of time and effort gathering up and scrutinizing dirty books, trying to come up with a suitable definition of pornography so they can throw people in jail for selling it. The dirty books are scrutinized first by the police, then by the district attorney, then by a local judge and jury, then by some appeals judges, and then finally, when the really pornographic pages are dog-eared from all this intense legal scrutiny, the books are shipped in unmarked crates to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the justices sit around in their robes and discuss them:
CHIEF JUSTICE: Okay, we have here the case of Nebraska v. The Huge Boar Adult Book Store and Health Spa, which is accused of selling an illustrated publication entitled Young Teenaged Babysitters with Flawless Skin Go to Daytona Beach to eight undercover agents on July 3, 1972. Have you all scrutinized the evidence?
OTHER JUSTICES (crowd around the evidence): Not yet! Not yet! We’re still scrutinizing, and ... My God! Look at this photograph! It looks like a—No, it can’t be—Yes it is! It’s a ...
CHIEF JUSTICE: Now as I interpret the First Amendment, the issue here is ... OTHER JUSTICES: It’s a flamingo! Incredible! I mean, I know flamingos thrive in captivity, but I had no idea that ... CHIEF JUSTICE: ... whether the constitutional guarantee of free speech conflicts with the ... OTHER JUSTICES: How do you suppose they got all that Cool Whip to adhere to the ceilings?
After a few sessions like this, the justices render a decision, which says: “Having reviewed the evidence in this case, the court finds that, inasmuch as the prothonotary nature of the alleged violation precludes a pro forma elucidation of its meretriciousness or meritoriousness per se, it cannot be determined whether such alleged violation may or may not be deleterious without a heck of a lot more scrutiny by the members of the court.”
Since nobody ever has the vaguest idea what the justices mean, their decisions always set off a new round of arrests and scrutiny throughout the legal system, which by now has accumulated over thirty million cubic yards of evidence suspected of being pornographic. Eventually, the national stockpile will get so large that the authorities will have to start giving pornography away to poor people, the way they did with cheese.
Years ago, the pornography industry was fairly small, because people were ashamed to be caught reading dirty books and magazines. Then along came Hugh Hefner, who had a dream: to publish a cultured, sophisticated magazine, a magazine with in-depth interviews of influential people, with top-notch fiction, with thought-provoking articles, with pictures of large-breasted women either naked or dressed up as bunny rabbits. The beauty of Hugh’s idea was that you could pretend you were buying his magazine to read the thought-provoking articles. You could grab an issue of Playboy and say “I’m very eager to read this interview with Albert Schweitzer,” knowing full well that it is very difficult to read any magazine when you hold it sideways, which is how people generally hold Playboy.
Hugh’s mistake is that he started to believe that Playboy really was a cultured, sophisticated magazine, and he started writing these enormous, droning articles about his philosophy of life. This was a stupid mistake. I mean, it’s not as if thousands of Playboy readers wrote in and said: “Hey, Hugh, enough with all these big-breasted naked women. What’s your philosophy of life?” But he published his philosophy anyway, and it took up many pages of valuable space that could have been used for naked women. Soon competitors sprung up, and now you can’t walk into a convenience store without seeing dozens of magazines like Hustler, Rogue, Gallery, Newsweek. Newsweek got into the market just recently, when it published a picture of a semi-naked woman on the cover. It’s a small start, but if it works out, I suspect that in a couple of years Newsweek will start telling us its philosophy of life, and people will be holding it sideways. If it plays its cards right, it might even get scrutinized by the Supreme Court.
Compressed Classics
One effective technique for avoiding boring conversations on airplanes is to pull an extremely sharp ax Out Of your briefcase and spend the entire flight fondling it and muttering. Of course, to get the ax onto the airplane, you’ll have to convince the airport security people that you’re not a hijacker:
SECURITY PERSON: Excuse Me, sir, but there’s an extremely sharp ax in your briefcase.
YOU: Yes, I need it for my business. I’m an ax murderer.
SECURITY PERSON: Oh, okay. Sorry to inconvenience you, but we have to be on the lookout for hijackers. It’s for your own protection.
YOU: Of course. Keep up the good work.
The only problem with the ax approach is that it tends to make the flight attendants skittery, and you may be forced to waste valuable time dealing with large numbers of armed law-enforcement personnel after you land.
SID: the technique I use to ward off boring conversations is to carry a book, which I pull out the instant a boring person tries to talk to me:
BORING PERSON: Hi. Where are you headed?
ME: Detroit.
BORING PERSON: No kidding? That’s where I’m headed.
ME: What an astounding coincidence. And here we are, sitting together on a plane bound for Detroit, the very place we’re both headed.
I think I’ll read my book now.
The problem here is that you have to actually read the book, which may turn out to be even more boring than the person you’re sitting next to, because, as a rule, books contain far too many words. For example, I was recently on a flight to St. Louis, unaware that my suitcase was going to get off at Indianapolis (apparently on the theory that all Midwestern cities are basically the same), and I read a new book about James Bond, the famous spy. I thought there would be no new James Bond books, because the person who wrote them is dead, but evidently the folks in the publishing world decided that if the original author was inconsiderate enough to die, then by God they would find somebody else to write his books for him. I think they’re onto something. I think they ought to use the same approach with other famous dead authors, such as William Shakespeare:
The Warble, Peddle, and Leek Publishing Company proudly announces Romeo and Juliet II–a sweeping saga of lust and passion that begins where the best-selling original left off. The story begins with the discovery that the two lovers didn’t really stab themselves hard enough to die, and follows them through their lustful and passionate efforts to escape the clutches of their warring families and find a peaceful life of lust and passion! Now on sale at every drugstore and supermarket in the world.
Better than the original!—The Bullock, Missouri, Herald Gazette Chronicle Bugle.
Lustful ... passionate!—Field and Stream.
A recently published book!—The New York Times.
Well anyway, I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized that, like most books, it had too many words. The plot was the same one that all James Bond books have: An evil person tries to blow up the world, but James Bond kills him and his henchmen and makes love to several attractive women. There, that’s it: twenty-four words. But the guy who wrote the book took thousands of words to say it. I mean, he never just writes: “Bond walked into the bedroom.” Instead, he writes:
“Bond eased the bedroom door latch open gently, praying that the click of the ZuchSweiss stainless steel door latch would not disturb the other inhabitants, and cautiously eyed the room, which he noted was paneled with European birch, or Betula verrucose, probably fr
om the Vorarlburg region of western Austria.” And it goes on like this for pages before Bond gets around to killing a henchman. I could barely wade through it.
I was tempted to start chatting with the person next to me about how we were both going to St. Louis.
And it’s not just spy novels. Most books are too long. I remember in college when I had to read The Brothers Karamazovby the famous Russian alcoholic Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It’s about these two brothers who kill their father. Or maybe only one of them kills the father. It’s almost impossible to tell, because what they mostly do is talk for nearly a thousand pages. If all Russians talked as much as the brothers Karamazov did, I don’t see how they found time to become a major world power.
Our literature professor told us that Dostoyevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazovto raise the question of whether there is a God. So what I want to know is, why didn’t Dostoyevsky just come right out and ask? Why didn’t he write:
Dear Reader,
Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me.
Sincerely,
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Here are some other famous works of literature that could easily have been summarized in a few words:
Moby-Dick–Don’t mess around with large whales, because they symbolize nature and will kill you.
A Tale of Two Cities–French people are crazy. Every poem ever written—Poets are extremely sensitive.
Think of all the valuable time we would save if authors got right to the point this way. People would be able to read several dozen great books in a matter of minutes. College would take about two weeks. We’d have more time for more important activities, such as reading newspaper columns.